Oscar award winning Daniel Day-Lewis feels most at home in his beloved Wicklow

Daniel Day-Lewis and his wife Rebecca Miller on the red carpet at the 2013 Oscar Awards
Photo by: Getty

He’s the greatest actor in the world after winning a record third Best Actor Oscar but to the people in a small village in County Wicklow he’s just a local lad made good.

Daniel Day-Lewis resides on a farm near the tiny Wicklow hamlet of Annamoe and returns there after conquering the world.He has been living there for over seventeen years.

Before winning the Oscar he said he would spend five years without working on a movie, living in his Wicklow home.

"This is the place that sustains me, the place where I planted myself."

"When the work is done, it's to this place that I return to as a refuge," he said when he was made a Freeman of Wicklow in 2010.

"It's a place where I feel the freedom to lie fallow if I need to for a period of time.

"Living in this place that I have now for 15 years I've always felt, more than any other place that I've been, that Wicklow is in harmony, complete harmony, with the demands that life has made," he said.

"The truth is I don't notice [the pressure of celebrity] around here because I'm allowed to live. I notice it elsewhere.”

His home, a 100 acre farm where he has a beautiful Georgian mansion is so isolated that locals do not see him for weeks or even months. They will occasionally glimpse him riding through the bleak mountains on his push bike.

Even more occasionally, when riding one of his motor bikes, he will stop into the local Roundwood Inn pub and sip a pint of Guinness while keeping to himself.

One fellow drinker told The Daily Mail, "He'll come in a couple of times a week and just sit alone at the bar with a pint of Guinness.

"He's always very pleasant and will pass the time of day, but he likes to be pretty much left alone.

"To be honest, I don't think too many of the locals actually realise who he is because he keeps such a low profile.

"He seems embarrassed when he is recognised and obviously has a bit of a problem with fame. Most people understand that and leave him in peace."

"Daniel is already fretting about having to go to the Oscars. He hates all the razzmatazz and standing around on the red carpet.

Parents whose kids attend the same school as his sons say he is a deeply involved parent who keeps to himself but never pulls the star routine at parent teacher meetings.

He is said to obsessively practice his twin hobbies of shoe-making and woodwork, as well as riding for hours on his push bike. He is said to be contemplating taking up stonemasonry now that ‘Lincoln’ is over.

His insistence on staying in character even when not on set has infuriated some fellow co stars including Liam Neeson, who was furious that Day-Lewis insisted on addressing him by his character's name even when they met in the gym at their hotel when filming “Gangs of New York.”

He lives with his wife Rebecca Miller, daughter of the famous playwright and sons Gabriel, by an earlier relationship, and Ronan and Cashel.

When accepting the honor he said, "On the principle that you should push yourself before you are thrown over, I really don't know what I have done to deserve this," he laughed.

He is famous or infamous for staying in character. When he played Christy Brown, the paraplegic in his first Oscar role, Day Lewis was moved around the set in his wheelchair. He allegedly broke two ribs from being so hunched over.

When he played wrongly convicted alleged IRA bomber Gerry Conlon in the Guildford Four movie “In The Name Of The Father,” he spent three nights in a freezing cold cell instructing people to throw water on him as they passed.

A worker on the film said, "I have never known anything like it.

"We all had to call him by his character's name, even if we bumped into him in the toilets.

"If he was doing a scene where he was being aggressive or having a fight, he would start getting really angry a few days beforehand, and would be glaring and snarling at people on the set.

"You had to know when to steer well clear of him because he could be pretty terrifying when he was in character.

"I must say, I personally gave him a wide berth because I thought he was nuts.

"But I met him socially shortly after doing the first picture with him and he was utterly charming and as nice as pie to me.

"It was as if, during filming, he actually became the person he was playing."